Test functional requirements

After you have designed your workload to be resilient to production stresses, rigorous testing is essential. This ensures that your system operates as intended and meets the expected levels of resiliency, ultimately safeguarding against unexpected failures in real-world scenarios.

Best Practices

Implement Comprehensive Testing Strategies

• Develop a suite of unit tests that cover critical components of your workload to ensure each piece functions as intended.
• Incorporate integration tests to validate the interactions between different parts of the system, ensuring that they work together seamlessly.
• Utilize automated testing frameworks to run tests consistently and efficiently, enabling quick feedback on changes and updates to the codebase.
• Set up performance tests to simulate real-world loads and stress conditions, validating that your system can handle expected and unexpected traffic without failure.
• Regularly review and update your tests to account for new features and changes in workload requirements, ensuring continued reliability.

Questions to ask your team

• Have you established a comprehensive test strategy that includes unit tests and integration tests?
• Are there automated testing frameworks in place to validate the functional requirements efficiently?
• How frequently do you run your tests, and are they included in your continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines?
• Do you monitor the outcomes of tests to ensure they consistently validate the expected functionality?
• Have you conducted failure testing or chaos engineering practices to assess how your application responds under stress?
• What measures do you take if a tested feature does not meet its reliability expectations?

Who should be doing this?

Quality Assurance Engineer

• Develop and execute unit tests to validate the functionality of individual components.
• Create integration tests to ensure that different components work together seamlessly.
• Collaborate with development teams to understand functional requirements.
• Monitor and report on test results, documenting any failures or issues encountered.
• Ensure that all tests are automated as much as possible for continuous testing.

DevOps Engineer

• Integrate testing processes into the CI/CD pipeline to ensure reliability is tested automatically.
• Manage the infrastructure required for testing, including staging and production environments.
• Monitor application performance and reliability during tests, providing insights after each test run.
• Implement automated deployment strategies to facilitate testing in various environments.

Software Developer

• Write code with testability in mind, including appropriate hooks for testing.
• Participate in developing unit and integration tests as part of the development process.
• Fix any issues identified during testing based on QA feedback.
• Maintain documentation related to testing strategies and frameworks used.

Product Owner

• Define and prioritize functional requirements to ensure they align with customer needs.
• Collaborate with the QA and development teams to clarify requirements during the testing phase.
• Review test plans and results to ensure they meet business expectations and requirements.
• Communicate the importance of reliability testing to stakeholders and teams.

What evidence shows this is happening in your organization?

• Reliability Testing Strategy Document: A comprehensive document outlining the strategies and methodologies for testing the reliability of workloads, including details on unit tests and integration tests to validate functionality.
• Unit Testing Checklist: A checklist to ensure all functional requirements are covered by unit tests, detailing the prerequisites, testing procedures, and expected outcomes.
• Integration Testing Plan: A structured plan that outlines the approach for conducting integration tests, including test cases, environments, and validation criteria to ensure system components work together as expected.
• Reliability Dashboard: A visual dashboard that displays real-time metrics related to the reliability tests conducted, showing pass/fail rates, issue tracking, and areas requiring attention.
• Testing Playbook: A playbook that guides teams through the processes of reliability testing, including step-by-step instructions and best practices for executing unit and integration tests.
• Functionality Validation Matrix: A matrix that maps functional requirements to specific tests being conducted, ensuring that all necessary functionalities are validated through testing.

Cloud Services

AWS

• AWS CodeBuild: A fully managed build service that compiles your source code, runs tests, and produces software packages ready to deploy.
• AWS CodePipeline: A continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.
• AWS Lambda: Allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers, and can be used for testing functions in a reliable serverless environment.
• AWS CloudWatch: Provides monitoring and observability of cloud resources and applications, allowing you to analyze performance and reliability.

Azure

• Azure DevOps: Provides tools for CI/CD that allow for automated building, testing, and deployment, ensuring that your applications include reliable tests.
• Azure Monitor: A comprehensive service that provides real-time performance monitoring and analytics, helping you ensure your workloads run reliably.
• Azure Functions: A serverless compute service that allows you to run event-driven code for unit and integration tests without managing infrastructure.

Google Cloud Platform

• Cloud Build: A service that executes your builds on Google Cloud, ensuring you can automate testing and integrate it into your CI/CD pipeline.
• Cloud Monitoring: Monitors the performance and reliability of applications, providing insights into how well they operate under production stress.
• Firebase Test Lab: A cloud-based app-testing infrastructure that lets you test apps across a wide variety of devices and configurations.